Local restraurants start buying into the Atkins diet

For more than 53 years, F. Tambellini Ristorante on Seventh Street has provided the… For more than 53 years, F. Tambellini Ristorante on Seventh Street has provided the people of Pittsburgh with Italian dishes, including pastas, parmigianas and marsalas.

Recently, though, Tambellini started to offer a weekly low-carbohydrate buffet featuring meat entrees, domestic and imported cheeses, fresh salad greens, Atkins-approved vegetables and specialty dishes such as pasta-less lasagnas and seafood frittatas – all created as an alternative to its high-carbohydrate menu of pastas and fried foods.

“We’ve seen the trend,” said Tambellini owner Charles Pellegrini. “People were going low-carb, and we even heard about it in the news.”

The trend springs from the increasing popularity of the Atkins diet and other low-carbohydrate diets, which are beginning to affect businesses – such as Italian restaurants, bakeries and pastry shops – that rely on high-carbohydrate foods for success.

Originally detailed in a book published in 1972, the Atkins diet emphasizes replacing foods that are high in carbohydrates with high-protein and fatty products.

The theory is that eating reduced amounts of carbohydrates forces the body to burn fat and shed weight. If dieters stick to specific types of food, mostly meat, eggs and dairy products, they can eat as much as desired and still continue to burn fat, according to Atkins. According to Atkins Nutritionals Inc., about 25 million Americans are on the Atkins diet, while nearly 100 million are following some form of reduced-carbohydrate diet.

Tony Benjamin, an operations manager at UNICCO in Ohio, offered his story as evidence of the diet’s effectiveness and an example of why it’s becoming so popular.

“I lost 180 pounds three years ago, and I’ve since put 60 of it back on,” Benjamin said. “I went no carbs. It took eight months to lose 180 pounds. [Before the diet,] I was borderline diabetic, and then my blood sugar was perfect – and my blood pressure was perfect at the end of the diet. It’s kind of addictive.”

Benjamin and the millions of other people on the Atkins diet are the driving force behind the shift that has occurred in the American appetite, which has moved from high-carbohydrate foods, like breads, pastries and pastas, to low-carbohydrate products, such as eggs, cheeses and meats. Last month, Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of meat products, announced a 75 percent increase in its fourth-quarter income – probably in some way a result of the high-protein regimens prescribed by the Atkins diet.

Like Tambellini, other owners of Pittsburgh-area high-carbohydrate businesses have taken steps to survive in a low-carbohydrate world.

“Most bakeries are reactive, and they try to promote the old-fashioned food pyramid,” said Nick Mancini Hartner, a baker at Mancini Bread by McKees Rocks Bread Company in the Strip District. “They try to throw the old stuff at [the customers], and people aren’t reacting to it. That’s been the bakery trend for the last three years.”

According to the National Bread Leadership Council, 40 percent of Americans are eating less bread than they did a year ago. Of that 40 percent, 63 percent say they are eating less to control their daily carbohydrate consumption.

“It came to the point where you start to see the numbers actually in your sales,” Hartner said. “So at that point, we decided to finally be proactive about [the trend] and get a product out that is low-carb, and give the customer what he wants, instead of trying to tell the customers what they want.”

Mancini produces two types of low-carbohydrate breads to meet the demands of its customers. The first is an ultra-low-carbohydrate Italian bread with four grams of carbohydrates per slice – one-fourth the number of carbohydrates in Mancini’s regular Italian bread. The second is a reduced-carbohydrate, multi-grain bread with eight grams of carbohydrates per slice. To make each style of bread, Mancini substitutes the recipe-prescribed flour, which is 95 percent carbohydrates, with destarched wheat, a high-protein by-product created in the production of flour. The result, when prepared and baked conventionally, is a low-carbohydrate, low-fat, high-protein bread that Hartner said has been extremely successful.

“It’s very popular,” Hartner said. “We sell out every day, usually.”

Other bakeries and pastry shops in Pittsburgh have noticed the low-carbohydrate trends induced by the Atkins diet, but they have not made any changes to their menu as a result. In fact, according to Dave Brown, owner of Craig Street Coffee and Deli in Oakland, the impact of the diet on his business has been mostly a change in the popularity of his offerings.

“We’ve probably sold more chicken salads, tuna salads, and once in a while we’ll have people come in and ask for a grilled chicken sandwich without the bread,” Brown said. “Last year at this time, we weren’t selling hardly any grilled chicken salads, and [now] we sell a dozen or two a day in the middle of winter.”

“We’ve never done that before,” he added, “so that’s an item on the menu that’s selling very well, probably because of the Atkins diet.”

According to Larry Lagattuta, owner of Enrico’s Biscotti in the Strip District, he has noticed no decrease in his sales as a result of the increasing popularity of the Atkins diet. Lagattuta said he has no future plans to offer any low-carbohydrate alternatives to his customers.

“We only use real stuff: real butter, real eggs, real flour, real sugar,” Lagattuta said. “I don’t like the way that stuff [low-carbohydrate ingredients] tastes, and we’re trying to be as authentic as we can.”

Lagattuta attributes the success of his business to the willingness of people to indulge in buying his biscotti. He says that while there are plenty of people on the Atkins diet, there are millions more not on the diet.

“There is some percentage of people [who] are on the Atkins diet, but, gosh, there is certainly a whole large percentage who comes in here and says, ‘I can’t have this … give me six of them,'” Lagattuta said. “I’m a carbohydrate pimp. You smell the smells and see the stuff and I say, ‘Come on!'”